Currently in Combibos, having eaten a brunch that might have destroyed an artery or two – scrambled eggs, bacon, fried toast, potato rosti. I feel massively guilty (to be scrupulous, though, I didn’t actually finish it. Ate about half of everything and then shoved it away. If I’d eaten it all I might have had a semi-involuntary semi-bulimic moment of forcing it all up again, I think) but it did taste pretty good, and in my defence, it’s both lunch and breakfast at once.
I’m supposed to be thinking about Aristotle and akrasia, which is one of my favourite topics ever, but for now I figured I’d talk about the trip I took to London and the past few days! What follows is the stuff I wrote on Tuesday, in London and on the way back to Oxford.
**
I write this in the very indulgent café in the Victoria and Albert, with a very indulgent cup of Darjeeling and slice of carrot cake, midway through a very indulgent day in lovely London Town. The day kicked off with a rather mad rush to the train station, though through no fault of my own – the bus was late! – and then sleepytimes on the train down. Getting off at Paddington, I was reminded of what E.M. Forster once said, terribly poetically, about trains:
Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return… and it is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.
These are not my exact sentiments, of course, and train travel has rather lost something of its savour in this age of jets. I can’t quite feel the same way about airports, alas. But I do feel for cities, very intensely: I love Oxford, that is true, but there’s something about dipping into the slipstream of people in a city that makes me feel like I’ve regained a little balance that wasn’t quite there before. Sitting on the tube station and listening to a pair of small German children count out money (ein-und-zwanzig, zwei-und-zwanzig), catching a pair of Japanese businessmen talking fast and furious in low voices (Dare ga warui? Doko ga ikenai?), getting off at Liverpool St station to wait for Erin and then ogling all the city people clattering past me in their business attire, all serious with poppies pinned to their lapels and their smartphones clutched tight in their hands and their shoes going click-click on the pavements, the young men in their slim jackets and the older men with the double Windsors at their throats, the young women arm-in-arm and the ubiquitous coffee cups everywhere.
Lunch with Erin was delightful and conversational, and the king prawn pasta with a tinge of chili was definitely nommy! Even if I don’t apply to Hiscox (given that I’ll need a work permit, meh), I’m glad I met her: she’s really fun and great to be around. She also recommended this juice with pear and spinach and ginger, which made me feel very healthy and good about myself. Shall experiment with juices in the future, maybe! Though admittedly I have not got a blender…
After that, I took the long way round on the tube to the V&A so I could doze off my post-lunch coma, then startled awake at South Kensington and went flying off onto the platform just as the doors were closing. Skittered off to the museum and went straight for the postmodernism exhibit, which was fascinating because it was a broader view of postmodernism than I’ve had so far, and it’s also a broader view than most people hold, I think. When postmodernism is brought up, a focal point is always Warhol, always the theories of reproduction and mass manufacture, but then again there’s a lot to think about when we talk about postmodernism! Ultimately, I’d rather forgotten that postmodernism was a response to modernism and modernism’s grid-and-order ideals, and the exhibit (which featured a great deal of functional stuff, like teapots and furniture and so on) reminded me that postmodernism was more than just performance and shock value. There were these particularly lovely two prints that were columbaria of architecture and houses, with the little people bowed and moving about beneath. The provenance was Soviet Russia, if I’m not wrong. Another thing that particularly appealed to me was this work by an artist who took out a billboard in New York saying ‘PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT’, which is such an amazing line. (On that note, though, it did remind me of this SMBC comic about nihilism.) I feel I’ve had a good dose of culture and I’m quite happy about that.
It’s been a good few days for me! Last night I went to watch Patrick Wolf (for the fourth time this year, and before you laugh at me, I must say I didn’t intend for this to happen, it just happened somehow. *grins*) at the O2 in Cowley, and it was so much fun! Fell in with a bit of a funky crowd –flamboyant gay boys, I always meet cute flamboyant gay boys at Patrick Wolf concerts, and also a boy who’d been behind me and Tabs in the queue in London at the last concert! That was quite funny because I didn’t recognise him, and two hours in, he turned to me and blurted, “I borrowed your umbrella at the last concert!” and my reaction could only have been described as, “Oh. Oh! OMGLULZ.”
We had a bit of a chat about body mod and horror movies (and The Human Centipede, heurgh) before he started! Sad that Jayson and Jay had to leave halfway, but the concert itself was awesome: he sang lots of songs from the old albums: Wolf Song, the angry roaring of Tristan and The Libertine (! love that song), the impeccably romantic-destructive Damaris and the pang-inducing Bluebells, but also all the crazy happy stuff off the new album, like the crazy-cheesy Bermondsey Street and the super-upbeat The Falcons. He is such an impeccable singer. If I’d heard Lupercalia first, I doubt it’d have been my taste, but I got into his work about the time of The Magic Position and now I’m rather attached to him, haha. It was a long concert! My feet were in agony at the end of it, but it was totally worth it.
(You know, after seeing the whole thing about postmodernism and the bricoleurs, I’m very tempted to try to apply that approach to poetry – taking a whole lot of lyrics and other bits of poems and stitching them up to make a new poem. It’d be problematic re: copyright and re: creativity, but again, surely the whole point of postmodernism is to challenge what it means to make art? We shall see!)
Prior to that, of course, there were three intense days of OxIMUN 2011, where I co-chaired the ASEAN committee with the lovely and amazing Athena Sharma (kisses to you, baby!), who was everything I could have dreamed of in a co-chair. The mesh in our working styles and our general personalities was perfect: and ASEAN 2011 was literally the tightest, most well-bonded committee I’ve ever been in, as a chair or as a delegate. Loved the lot of them My flatmates will attest to the fact that when it ended on Sunday night I was rather… deflated, is the word, I think! I was certainly horribly sad that it was over, especially since it’s been a long time since my last conference and therefore a long time since I last felt this kind of MUN atmosphere. Shoutouts also to the amazing people on the secretariat, who made all this possible. I know they must have worked like horses to make sure everyone had an intense and fantabulous three days!
Going to watch Sakamoto Ryuichi tonight, though first I’m going to have dinner with Cao Lei and Mich, and then maybe we’ll hit up a bar afterwards. The decadence continues!
*
On the train back to Oxford now, after the amazing that was Sakamoto Ryuichi. But before I jump to the concert: dinner first! We ate at this gorgeous place called Yoshino, on a side lane off Piccadilly Place with a misleadingly neon sign announcing ‘SUSHI’. I rounded the corner and let off a loud ‘AH HAH!’, incidentally startling the cute Italian guy who was coming round the corner at the other end. Oops. It was a yummy dinner, though! I got the yuki set, and so did Cao Lei, which was full of nommy, happiness-inducing goodness, along with hot sake and matcha ice cream at the end. Solid dinner, to accompany the shopping I’d done earlier: wagashi at Minamoto Kitchoan and a merino wool sweater plus heattech camisole at Uniqlo. I tremble at the thought of sitting down to do my bills at the end of this week… but nonetheless it was a solid and well-done dinner!
After that, we had a bit of a speed walk (more like run, really), having underestimated the amount of time it’d take us to walk from Piccadilly to the South Bank. We nearly didn’t make it in time, but we did: and in doing so, I had an opportunity to prove to myself that I am indeed still capable of the hundred-metre stiletto sprint. After getting there, I collapsed into my seat and settled down for what proved to be a mindblowing concert: the fast-paced dramatic music was especially moving and beautiful. I swear there were moments where I didn’t breathe till the song came to an end. It was fantastic, although my tastes are a little too plebian for the slightly more avant-garde bits. I like my music melodic. To round off the shopping spree, I bought myself a CD of his music! Looking forward to listening to it, mm. I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes piano music. The other person I’d love to listen to in concert is probably Joe Hisaishi. A glass of wine and some chat, and here I am on the train, on the way back to quiet Oxford.
**
Shall get back to my essay now, I think. Hopefully the feeling of having eaten far, far too much will go away in a bit.
sourdough 